Cookies with a moisture content above about 6% by weight are usually soft or chewy and cohesive. To produce cookies which retain enough moisture to be classified as soft or chewy, numerous humectants have been used. Exemplary thereof are raisins, raisin pastes, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, glycerine, and mixtures thereof. Without the use of such humectants, cookie doughs which contain sufficient water to compensate for volatilization during baking: 1) do not exhibit sufficient cohesiveness for forming into pieces on conventional commerical scale cookie forming equipment, 2) exhibit raw flavor or color qualities, and 3) most importantly, lose their soft or chewy texture within a week or within a few days even when properly packaged in air-tight packaging. Generally, increasing the humectant content of the cookie dough extends the textural stability of soft or chewy cookies. However, as the humectant content of a cookie dough is increased, undesirable texture, appearance and/or flavor characteristics may appear in the final product and dough machineability tends to be reduced to an unacceptable extent.
For example, while raisins and raisin pastes typically contain about 19% by weight water which is held during baking, their flavor and color may be undesirable in certain types of cookies such as butter cookies, vanilla cookies, and the like. Additionally, these humectants tend to contribute localized soft or chewy regions to a cookie rather than a homogeneous soft or chewy texture. Furthermore, these ingredients are relatively expensive for the highly competitive mass-produced cookie market.
Liquid humectants such as high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, glycerin and molasses are more readily dispersed through a dough for providing a homogeneously soft or chewy texture to the cookies. However, these liquid humectants increase the adherent properties or "stickiness" of cookie doughs. Sticking or adherence of this dough to rotary cutters, reciprocating cutters, cutter aprons, oven belts, and wire cutters place an upper limit on their use in producing extended shelf-stable soft or chewy cookies on a commercial scale. In addition to increasing stickiness, the liquid humectants can result in difficulty in extruding the dough and forming the doughs into pieces. Cookie dough softness and adherency considerations have generally limited the liquid humectant content and water content of cookie doughs such that cookies mass produced from such doughs exhibit shelf-stable soft or chewy textures for periods of only up to about three weeks with proper air-tight packaging.
The present invention provides a method for mass producing cookies having an extended shelf-stable soft or chewy texture throughout for periods of from about six months to one year with proper packaging. The exceptionally long textural stability of the cookies are obtained from a coextruded dough composition which contains a liquid humectant in an amount sufficient to impart the extended shelf-stable soft texture to the cookie. In spite of the high level of liquid humectant, the coextruded dough composition possesses sufficient firmness and cohesiveness to be formed into pieces without sticking or adhering upon dough forming and transferring equipment. The cookies produced from the coextruded dough composition have the appearance of a single dough cookie.